


Second date

by myoue



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: First Dates, M/M, One-Sided Attraction, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-05
Updated: 2018-08-05
Packaged: 2019-06-22 10:43:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15580191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myoue/pseuds/myoue
Summary: It breaks Victor’s heart when Yuuri doesn’t immediately schedule for a second date.





	Second date

**Author's Note:**

> i started writing this 4 months ago because i was sad and bored. i finished writing it because missed opportunities make me even sadder and also someone told me they liked this and i got all emotional. there's a hopeful ending. i'm not a complete masochist.

It breaks Victor’s heart when Yuuri doesn’t immediately schedule for a second date.

Because Yuuri had talked to him the whole time with such rawness in his voice—sultry and oppressive—that it’d made Victor’s heart race, in a pain so sweet it felt somewhat masochistic.

Perhaps it’d been his own fault for trying to romanticize a life and love that didn’t exist yet by way of hope that’d gone terribly astray, conceiving of such grandiose fantasies of themselves atop pretty park bridges overlooking stunning rock formations and running streams, or underneath wooden gazebos during the smell and feel of summer thunderstorm rain.

Of course, he’d placed these painted expectations on Yuuri without consultation of any sort, and along with the consequences of his own imagination, he’ll rightly accept the dread that comes with having accidentally, potentially, friendzoned Yuuri.

“The first date,” he enlightens Chris later afterwards, “went horribly.”

“I’m sorry for that,” Chris says in distant sympathy, like that of watching some prey being remorselessly eaten by its predator on the Discovery Channel, like that’s just the way nature has to go.

“You’re not going to ask what happened?”

“Well, what happened?”

He proceeds to tell Chris in very excruciating detail the ways in which the light happened to fall across Yuuri’s face, brightening up the brown in his eyes and his hair, that might have caused a minor aneurysm in Victor, but he doesn’t really know for sure if that’s what it was because he’s never experienced an aneurysm before, and Yuuri had continued eating his food whilst chaos was going on within Victor like nothing was wrong. Yuuri had blithely curled his lip whilst still chewing, flicking his tongue out, and then sticking both his hands in between his thighs, leaning just a little bit forward as if to be extremely enamored with something on Victor’s face but not quite curious enough to comment about it. Victor might have unconscionably leant back a bit in his seat, lips having parted with words of dire adoration caught in his throat, because he wasn’t sure if this closing distance would be acceptable for the chastity of a first dinner date, nor if Yuuri had meant to be so forward at all. Victor had felt winded from it all, regardless.

“How so very sad,” Chris relays.

Victor turns from his place in the grass under the old thick oak they’re sitting by, attempting to stare straight into the sun until he goes blind, and enduring the residual panging against his rib cage that does too much to embarrass him during the worst of times.

He sighs, “Am I still allowed to compliment him when I see him? Or is it too late now?”

“You are explicitly barred from that,” Chris tells him seriously. He himself is wearing the successful combination of a navy blazer, mid-thigh white boat shorts, and fuchsia sunglasses. He takes off his coloured glasses and tosses them into Victor’s lap like Victor needs them more than him. 

-

So once again, Victor hates to be the one making plans. His phone feels like dead weight in his hands, filled with what he’s sure will ultimately become dead time after this is all completely over and done with and he reminds himself just how long he’s been staring at the wall. It’s just not worth it.

Yuuri is aggressively one-note, his answers taking so long to come that Victor feels like a modern day maiden waiting for any word at all from a devoted husband now devoted to an unwinnable war. Except Yuuri isn’t his husband, there’s no war except in Victor’s head, and even medieval maidens with papyrus and carrier pigeon didn’t have to wait this long for a word.

But eventually it does come, after days, stretching out into weeks sometimes if it’s a particularly slow one.

There—on his phone in the form of a ding—is Yuuri’s one-note.

It will finally lay Victor’s feelings to rest.

Except that it doesn’t, because Yuuri’s message manages to be so exceptionally darling and cute and innocently apologetic that Victor can only imagine him cuddled right up next to his phone, still sleepy from hibernation (or whatever it was that took him this long to answer), and tacking on so many slurred extra letters to the ends of all his words that Victor can’t believe another boy could be so delightfully _like this_.

It’s not fair. Yuuri is too kind to a fault and _undeserving_ , and when he comes out looking just as good as Victor had imagined he’d be in a pale blue knit sweater, he sips quietly on warm coffee in a mug and saucer, just as inexplicably leant forward towards Victor as he was the last time.

-

Look up at the world not down at your phone—that’s a sentiment that he’s heard a million times by now.

Not always in those exact words. Sometimes it’s “ _he’s probably just not interested in you_.” Though, Victor’s already considered that as a possibility. Of course he has. A million times over.

But who exactly are the ones that made the world like this for them? Who made it so that connecting with other’s hearts and emotions no matter how far apart could be done instantaneously? Who made the rest of the world so boring and lifeless and frustratingly incomplete by comparison? Victor considers himself a victim—one of the economy, of so-called technological reliance, and of the breakdown in communication in this one-sided high fantasy romance.

 _Yaaaaaaaa_ , Yuuri texts, _I had a bit of a headache that was really annoying me so I took a nap. But I’m awake now and I still have the headache._

 _Aw! Take some medication_.

 _I did, but I’m immune to it_.

_Oh… did you have a good dream at least?_

_Hmmmm, just about normal things. Everyday things. They’re always so ordinary, I can never dream of fantastical things and that’s why I never remember any of them. Like this one, I remember it because it just happened five minutes ago. I was walking for a really long time until I got to the other side._

_The other side...? Of a street? A wheat field?_

_I don’t really know… But when I got there somehow I knew it was the other side. Like I knew that I’d made it somewhere, and I guess I felt so fulfilled about it that I woke up._

_Oh, that must have been one good other side. Maybe you knew it was just the right time to wake up? So you did?_

_Wellllllll, I woke up to your text blinking so furiously at me so maybeeeeee…_

_Ah, so it’s my fault!_

_:)_

_That’s a yes?_

_:))_

_It is!_

And then radio silence for days. Victor’s heart is on a steady but purposeful burn.

-

He’s never tried so hard in his life, never pursued a single person for the amount of time that he has, or loved so deeply and intricately that considering anything else didn’t even seem to be an option. Over seventy new conversations were started up in the past month. Is he bothering Yuuri? Is he being a nuisance? But Yuuri never quite seems rejecting, only vaguely confused and sometimes whimsically accepting. Maybe, in just one of those conversations and superficial trains of thought, Victor was hoping that he would receive something definitive.

He’s given a chance to settle everything for good when he sees Yuuri in a bake shop on the corner one afternoon.

“Oh, what a coincidence,” Victor says, even though it doesn’t feel like a coincidence at all. It feels rather planned, like for the amount of times Yuuri materializes in his thoughts, during all this time, he would be bound to show up in front of Victor sometime. Like how once you’re introduced to someone, you start seeing them everywhere, even though you’re sure you had never once crossed their path before that point, even when you didn’t know them.

“Mmm, it is a coincidence,” Yuuri replies, holding a wrinkled plastic bag under his fingertips. “Do you come here often?”

Victor shakes his head. “Only to buy bread when I’m feeling like it.”

They have a seat at a table outside under the canopy and eat their bread together. Victor talks about his work. Yuuri talks about how much he hates raisins in things where they don’t belong. And when they’re done, Victor buys Yuuri another chewy, flaky croissant because he doesn’t want this to end. Yuuri could have put the waxy paper bag in his pocket and taken it home but he stays and eats it there.

“I’ll walk you to the station,” Victor offers after even that’s done, putting on his hat.

“Was that a date?”

Before they can start walking, Victor brings his hand down, looking back at Yuuri who shoves his hands in his coat and has an expression that stirs. He can’t quite handle looking at Victor before glancing away.

“Was it?”

“I don’t know…” Yuuri licks into the inside of his mouth, moving anxiously. “Were the other ones dates?”

Victor doesn’t quite frown but can’t quite bring himself to smile as wide as he could. In some way, somehow, he had known the whole time this coincidental encounter would be something formative in their relationship, or lack thereof. “If you want them to be,” he enlightens.

Yuuri breathes, seeming to have trouble forming his thoughts. They’re swimming around in his head, evident in the rapid fluttering of his eyelashes and the push and pull uncertainty of his lips. “I… didn’t even think to question it until about halfway through the first one. And then afterwards, I kept thinking about it and still couldn’t come to any sort of conclusion. I turned it over and over because I didn’t know what quite made one. Am I… is it my fault? All this time, I… kept wondering if I was disappointing you by not saying anything.”

“It’s okay. I didn’t think of dates as dates either if they were with people I didn’t like in that way.”

Victor thinks he understands it now, when people before would pursue him because they liked him.

Everything becomes high risk high reward. But they would do it all anyway. At the risk of being a bother, they would text. At the risk of sounding desperate and uncomfortable, they would lay themselves open. Until he gets something that could in the littlest ways be considered a no, he would keep going ad nauseam, ad infinitum, enjoying every interaction for what it is until its inevitably sweet demise. At least he can say he tried—just a little more, and a tiny little bit more, every time.

“I thought of ours as dates,” Victor admits with a half-hearted chuckle. He nods, shrugging his shoulders up to his ears with abundant non committance so Yuuri doesn’t feel pressure to think the same. “I did. I thought of them as dates because I wanted them to be. I wished they would be. I like you and I hoped you would like me too.”

He says that quickly but with practiced softness, only having been composed over and over in different ways in his own head up until that point, never feeling quite as real as it does in that moment. It betrays the pressure that he’d wanted to lift off Yuuri.

Victor wants to believe he’s being brave in his confession, as brave as Yuuri is being here with bringing this up after dealing with Victor and having it aching within him. But in the end it had become so easy for Victor to say what he’d always wanted to after all.

And Yuuri—the one whose heart Victor's so keenly after, who has a penchant for delayed reactions and breathy words—tells him that if it’s not over yet, they can consider this their first date. They’ll go from there, perhaps.

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr: [cofferi](http://cofferi.tumblr.com)


End file.
